


In spite of

by Faimor



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Erik's a damsel in distress, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Humor, Pietro's a knight in shining armor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-17 16:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faimor/pseuds/Faimor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Pentagon breakout Pietro got a nice new hobby.</p><p>Written for a prompt: Pietro. Loving dad despite all his crap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The story

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Вопреки (In spite of)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2274207) by [Faimor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faimor/pseuds/Faimor). 



> It's my first attempt at translating Russian into English and not the other way around. English isn't my first language, so feel free to point out my mistakes :)
> 
> The translation is finished. I pray for it not to be beyond hope.

− Hi, dude!  
Erik knows the voice. He doesn’t answer immediately, just glances sideways with a bit of caution. The bright prankish grin looks familiar too. And the crazy hairstyle, it reminds him of all these expensive elite hair stylists… though Erik knows for sure that it was just the cross-wind.  
− It’s a kind of hobby of yours, yeah? Forcing the Government to build prisons for you, every new one without a single nail in it? – asks Quicksilver. He stares at Erik’s prison robes with some kind of cheerful curiosity.  
− And yours, it seems, is stealing me out of them? – asks Erik in return.  
− Haven’t decided yet, – shrugs the kid. He smiles again and thrusts his hands out in a gesture that looks almost pathetic.  
Still, the polymer Plexiglas of three inches thick is not glass at all, and Pietro’s once proven trick this time yields no result. Low bone-shattering rumble rolls around the prison cell – and that’s how it ends. Pietro pouts, looks considering for a couple of seconds – much, much longer in his own time, perhaps – and then grins again.  
− It seems to be yours! – says he after a while of rummaging in his pockets. And then makes a wide swing and hastily turns away.  
Plexiglas is durable but it doesn’t stand a chance against two heavy steel balls at about five Mach speed. Erik acts on pure instinct and catches the balls before they touch the opposite wall, making them circle on their usual orbits above his palm. Pietro whistles rapturously, gives him a smack on the shoulder in approvement and suggests joyously:  
− Well, let’s go?  
* * *  
− Listen, dude, I’m quite concerned with your thing for prisons! – says Pietro in a confidential tone. It happens much later, when the most complicated security system in the whole North America gives up to his enthusiasm and lets it’s prey out of the polymer jaws. – You, like, do it on purpose!  
Erik has no chance to answer. This time he doesn’t struggle to keep his food inside, ‘cause Pietro came far before dinner, but his way of transporting people is still not a little bit unpleasant.  
− Hey, maybe you should just… I don’t know… try BDSM or some thing? – suggests Pietro a half an hour later, when they sit in a diner and wait for proper food. He looks up at Eric’s emotionless face and waves his hands with pure children’s delight: – Y’know, handcuffs, chains, lashes, all that crap. Maybe you’ll let yourself off at last! – He considers it for a moment, wiggles his brows meaningly and pushes his shoulder into Erik’s: − Y’know, Hank made a new wheelchair for Prof, he looks fucking imposing now!  
If someone else so much as dared to suggest a thing like that, Erik would kill him on the instant. To his own surprise, he just gives Quicksilver a cuff on the nape. It’s even more a surprise that the kid doesn’t try to dodge the clip and only after that snorts haughtily and disappears with a gust of wind.  
Erik apprehends for a second that Pietro resented, but just a second later a wallet falls on his knees and he founds a credit card and a driver license for Max Eisenhardt inside. Erik’s photo in the license has thick moustache drawn over it  
* * *  
− Your blue chick was going to come too, but I’ve been the first! – exclaims Pietro proudly. The alarm system bawls about the whole building, but he was never concerned with such trifles. – It seems to be yours!  
Erik hums and catches his two halfs of pound of steel with a touch of thought. It became some sort of ritual, it seems.  
* * *  
− It’s a kinda perfect system, aunty Charlie and you. – Quicksilver is thoughtful and unusually quiet, and Erik should perhaps get concerned about it, but he feels too content for it now. They sit on the roof of the New York’s business center, and the whole building is a battle-ready weapon under Magneto’s hands, all steel, glass and a little bit of concrete. It’s a heaven’s pleasure after a couple of months in a perfect plastic feebleness. – That one, y’know, with a good cop and a bad cop. You’re the bad, of course. Y’do yet another impressive crap, then comes good Charlie, makes it all the right way and always does his brain-chewing thing about not driving people – Homo Superior, okay! − over the edge. …Hey, why do you look at me like that? Fuck, dude, I don’t only have quick legs for quick running, I have quick brains for quick thinking too. I couldn’t manage all that without them, not with my speed.  
− So, all this occurrences are his game? – The thought doesn’t seem ridiculous. Erik would just make fun of it a year or two… or ten ago, but now it seems to become hardly a fun.  
− Nope, − Pietro considers it for a moment and shakes his head. – Aunty Charlie is to kind for that sort of shit. But he’s pragmatic too, he just can’t let the things you’ve already done be lost in vain. Makes good use of it, I should say. The Congress has already turned down about nine or ten mutant-oppressing laws.  
− And why do you call him “aunty”? – asks Erik after a while. He doesn’t want to dwell on the thought that Quicksilver has come alone for the last four times.  
− ‘Cause I have no legal ground to call him “stepmother”, − answers Pietro in such a serious tone that it sounds absolutely wild. For a long, long moment Erik is totally dumbfounded, but before he gathers himself to think of another question, Pietro asks as if continuing an old conversation: − D’you know, how many dudes in the world can control metal?  
Erik raises his brow in perplexity.  
− Only one, − whispers Pietro confidentially. – I asked Charlie to check it up with Cerebro, the info’s fucking accurate!  
And the next moment all Erik has is just a gust of wind. Again.  
* * *  
Sunrise in Mojave Desert is pure magic. Erik’s relentless anger, his life’s companion, the one he got used to, like a cripple and his maim, melts away in the clear golden air and leaves his soul hollow and resonant like a metal lense of a hang drum*. There’s not nearly enough place on the stone for the two of them and Pietro’s sharp shoulder blades thrust into Erik's back; and still Erik just stares at the horizon squinting and sips his boiling hot coffee from a metal thermos bottle. Another plastic cage is left far behind, at the borders of the Death Valley; Pietro has ransacked the department of seizure evidence before coming with yet another “guest visit”, and two steel balls circle on their intricate orbits above their heads; Quicksilver himself beams with contentment like a cat in sunlight – playing havoc with a government facilities and going unpunished does that to him.  
− Is it aluminum? – Erik rocks the bottle in question and then recalls that Pietro can’t see his gesture, but the kid doesn’t need any explanations.  
− Rubbish! – answers Quicksilver indignantly. – Science and progress doesn’t stop in their tracks! It’s stainless. I mean, stainless steel. – He considers it for a moment and adds generously: − Take it if you want!  
− It’s not yours anyway, − laughs Erik and Pietro snorts derisively, confirming that he guessed right.  
The empty thermos bottle floats up, opens like a blooming flower and drops a lifeless seed of its plastic cap on the sand, crumples and melts ceaselessly. Erik doesn’t intend to make something in particular, just tries to taste the metal with his mind, blends its atoms and molecules at random. Quicksilver sets his shoulder on Erik’s flank and stares at the pliant steel with pure childish rapture; he has grown a lot in the last year and became skinnier. He looks a lot like Erik himself now, scrawny and tough, though Erik cannot undo the outcomes of hungry childhood and Pietro still can get away with it.  
Erik thinks suddenly that there’s something off: the metal ribbon in a cross cap looks too thin and fragile, and he reaches for his weapon without a second thought. Spirals of metal peel off the steel balls like orange rind and join the united flow; Pietro snuffles, fidgets and stabs Erik’s flank with his elbow, glancing at him guiltily, but Erik is almost impossible to distract.  
If he were a little bit more of a poet, he could say that metal talks to him. But he doesn’t name it one way or another, just does what he deems necessary: bends and binds three formerly separate parts, twists and changes them, extends and crumples again, puts them together, presses and intertwines… A narrow patterned blade of a misericorde floats in the air in front of him and Erik frowns slightly. His deed is not finished yet, and the hilt sprouts thin threads of metal, they twirl and twist and twine themselves round the haft from garde to pommel. The base of the blade should be branded with a mark of the craftsman, but instead of the solemn and polysemantic “M” – Magneto, mutant, memento mori at worst – it carries the first letters of his real name.  
Eric stares at the work of his thought in confusion: the satisfied need fades in his mind slowly and he has no idea about what to do with the weapon. Except for…  
Quicksilver doesn’t say a single word of gratitude, just nods and takes the dagger out of the air like he did it for a hundred times before. A moment after the blade is tacked to his forearm with a pair of leather straps, and then Pietro disappears in a whirl of sand dust.  
Erik grins, picks up a wallet that fell at his feet – this time his name is Michael Fassbender – tips the hat over his eyes and goes his way.  
* * *  
The next time Erik is ready for the guest coming. He can feel the metal that was changed by his mind and his will with much more precision and subtlety, and his crooked grin makes the unsuspecting guards nervous.  
− Its name’s Warmehalter**, − declaires Quicksilver in an almost triumphant tone. Erik arches his brow in amusement, and the kid adds in a patient tone that is usually saved for half-wits and mental patients: − It’s because it was made of a thermos bottle.  
Somehow Erik thinks that it is only a half of the truth.  
He thought that the trinket will be collecting dust somewhere in the attic. It cost him just a couple of minutes to make, and Pietro has no need in weapon at all and could just forget about it. But now the kid has a sturdy, custom-made sheath on his shoulder, and Warmehalter stands out in all its splendor with its hilt up. It’s not comfortable to unsheathe, will take too much time when every little part of second could be crucial. Quicksilver is just showing off because he’s not the man to be troubled with such a problem.  
The Government tries to learn by their mistakes too: Quicksilver’s supernatural speed is out of their control and still humans can hinder him to use its benefits. Erik’s prison is all narrow winding corridors and tiny rooms, and every single one is locked like Fort Nox. Pietro has no place to take a run. And still it seems that he isn’t a little bit concerned: he rambles on about computers, about how to use this exceptionally work device for some kind of special games and reproaches Erik caustically for the expenses he had caused to poor, miserable and poverty-stricken USA Congress. A guard has regained consciousness in an entirely wrong moment and less than a second later he screams in pain because his palm is pierced all the way through. Pietro seems to have thrown the dagger aiming for the sound and now glances at Erik expectantly as if waiting for the praise. Erik raises his brow in amusement and the kid deems it to be quite enough. Erik snorts and summons the stuck blade and Quicksilver catches it without using his own power as if just for show.  
He clearly enjoys using the weapon and even more enjoys the help of experienced metallokinetic for his dance but – Erik lowers, suspecting Charles’s influence – tries not to kill anyone.

* * *  
It is the thing that does him a bad favor. This – and a silly accident, the one of unbelievable absurdity and impossibility.  
Erik reacts as always: first the cloud of metal shards that he picked up by the way turns every possible threat into bloody mess, and after that – less than a second after – rushes to Quicksilver. The kid is clamping a deep flank wound but seems terribly aggrieved by such a universal injustice instead of frightened. Erik’s fear would be more than enough for the two of them, and the fear helps him to master the skill he struggled to grasp for a long time – the control over the little amounts of metal in humans blood. Still he can only prevent the blood loss but can’t heal, though now they have enough time to reach the nearest town.  
And then Erik just fishes out of a parking lot an ambulance car with a medical team, warns them and makes a promise a cruel death from their own alarm clocks and dishwashers to be sure that he can entrust them Pietro, who is already his usual sarcastic self. The emergency doctors are terrified and ready to believe that Magneto could reach their devices from another side of the world, but fortunately forget about their fear when the work starts.  
Erik was used to losing his brothers in arms and still neither then nor later he doesn’t think about why he was so horrified by the thought about the possible death of this juvenile arrogant prick.  
* * *  
Pietro still persists. Magneto feels almost frantic with it: the kid should have understood it a while ago, should have receded his indulgence for humans. Of course Pietro consorts with Xavier, and Charles was always glad to coax another young naïve mind to his “good side”…  
− I AM on the good side, dude! – Pietro’s indignance is ardent and frank, but he still is too careful with the prison guards. And after a little while he twists his lips in a vaguely familiar smile and adds: − Where I am, there’s the good side.  
Erik’s forged documents this time are fully legal: Pietro made friends with a projective telepath from Xavier’s School freshmen and the documents were made in the police department of Nothern Salem with headed note-papers and all required seals.  
* * *  
Times change. One day Warmehalter’s blade ends up not in another guard’s shoulder, but in his throat.  
− Well, oops. – Quicksilver shrugs, takes the dagger Erik returned to his hand and just goes ahead.  
Magneto gloats: his ally has just made another step to the right way.  
What Erik feels too much reminds of regret.  
* * *  
− Listen, old man, have you ever spared a thought for one strange thing? I mean, have you ever thought that something is just wrong? – Pietro pokes him in the ribs and asks in a conspiratorial tone: – Got any ideas, hmm? I mean, you spent a fucking lot of time sitting in prison during the last… well, fucking lot of years.  
− Got any ideas? – asks Erik in his turn. He knows the reason: it’s hard to win when your real adversary it a telepath and much more than that, he’s your ex-friend and knows you better than you do yourself. There’s no use voicing it for Pietro, though; all he could hear in return would be just another dozen of obscene hints, a hundredth suggestion of help with the wedding fuss right the next week-end and a kid’s whimpering about mom and dad and their endless quarrels. Times change, human customs change too and become more and more free and tolerant, and now Erik himself tends to think sometimes that Pietro’s assurance isn’t absolutely groundless.  
− Well, m’be it’s time to change something? Modus operandi for example or other shit like that, – suggests Pietro hopefully. The Central park is deserted, a fat pigeon approaches them with dignity and stares expectantly, clearly hoping to get something to eat. It loses a dozen of feathers, and Pietro tucks them into Warmehalter’s sheath alongside of the blade. – You can see it too now; I mean, that the previous one doesn’t work. And those methods of yours are… − He screws up his face and Erik is ready to hear Charles’s voice out of his lips, but instead of something like “inhumane” Quicksilver finishes determinately: − unpractical. So why did you try to wipe out the whole humankind, hey? Why, dude?  
− And why not? – asks Erik raising his eyebrows in surprise.  
− I like BigMacs, − informs Piero suddenly. Looks at him intently to make sure that Erik understands his words the right way and continues: − Can you imagine a mutant – and proud – making BigMacs for me? – He clearly waits for any kind of response and Erik shakes his head in denial after a little while. – Yep, that’s it! And now a lot, I mean, a fucking lot of people make a lot of BigMacs every day and I perceive the happiness. And you were about to wipe them out, that won't do!  
− Okay, I’ll certainly keep a dozen or two for you! – laughs Erik loudly to his own surprise. Pietro answers with another laugh and shoves his fist into Erik’s shoulder amicably as if such a promise is more than enough for him; and still Erik doesn’t want this talk to end with yet another joke:  
− You don’t like my methods, you don’t agree with my ideas… So why have you got me out of confinement for more than a dozen times already?  
Quicksilver’s smile changes a little bit, it becomes strained and clearly artificial. He sits silent for a minute and a half, it’s terribly long – and then he lifts his gaze to meet Erik’s eyes, and Erik becomes aware that he will hear the truth now. And he won’t like it perhaps.  
− It’s… I just love you, dad, − says Pietro quietly and disappears in a puff of wind on instant.  
Erik hums silently and smiles.  
…three blocks south Warmehalter warms up to 36,6 centigrade***, shifts in its sheath and shoves it’s hilt slightly in Quicksilver’s shoulder.


	2. Notes

* You can listen to hang drum here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3BvNLeNgw – and yeah, it was created a lot later. Sorry, I did mess up the timelines.  
** Wärmehalter (german.) – warm-keeper. It’s not the exact translation, actually, just an attempt to think of the name that would sound a bit nicer.  
*** A temperature of human body in my country’s usual way of measure. I mean, healthy humans body. Sorry, I don’t know, how much it would be by Fahrenheit.


End file.
